At least 13 people, including seven police officers, were killed and eight others wounded in three shootouts involving police and "armed commandos" on the border of Jalisco and Michoacán states in west-central Mexico Dec. 23. The first incident came when Michoacán state police responded to a report of a traffic accident in Briseñas  municipality and were ambushed. Similar gunfights shortly followed in the nearby municipalities of Quitúpan and Ayotlán. The following day, bullets flew in the central plaza of Yurécuaro, Michoacán, in what authorities called a shootout between the Knights Templar and Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel, leaving an unarmed bystander dead. Also on Christmas Eve, a group of armed men stormed the town of El Platanar de Los Ontiveros in the mountains of northwestern Sinaloa state, killing nine with assault weapons and dumping their bodies on a sports field. Authorities called that one a fight between the Sinaloa Cartel and the Zetas. (AP, Dec. 26; AFP, Dec. 25; EFE, Dec. 24; Milenio, Dec. 23)

Following up on an exposé last April of bribery by Wal-Mart de México, the Mexican subsidiary of US retailer Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., the Dec. 18 edition of the New York Times provided details on how the company used payoffs to get around community opposition and building and environmental regulations that might slow down its campaign to build more stores. Reporters David Barstow and Alejandra Xanic von Bertrab wrote that by reviewing tens of thousands of documents they had identified 19 Wal-Mart stores whose construction was aided by corruption.

The Mexican media have closely followed the renewed US interest in gun control after the killing of 20 children and eight adults in Newtown, Connecticut on Dec. 15. Laws regulating the sale of firearms in the US have an immediate impact on Mexico, where some 50,000 people have been killed since 2006 in the government's "war on drugs" and in fighting between rival drug cartels. Statistics that the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) submitted to the US Senate in 2011 indicate that some 70% of the illegal firearms seized in Mexico in 2009 and 2010 came from the US; Mexico itself has very strict controls on gun ownership.

On Dec. 22, followers of the indigenous pacifist group Las Abejas (the Bees) held a ceremony at the hamlet of Acteal, in the highlands of Mexico's southern Chiapas state, to remember the massacre there in 1997, and demand justice in the case. The group accused then-president Ernesto Zedillo and his Government secretary Emilio Chuayffet—today Secretary of Education—of being responsible for the attack, in which 45 unarmed Abejas were killed by a paramilitary group. The Abejas gathered at the "Pillar of Infamy," a monument erected at the massacre site, joined by supporters and those displaced by the violence of the 1990s from throughout the Chiapas Highlands.

Thousands of Maya followers of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) marched, masked but unarmed, on the towns of San Cristóbal de las Casas, Ocosingo, Las Margaritas, Palenque and Altamirano, in Mexico's southern state of Chiapas, marking the turning of the Maya calendar Dec. 21. The largest march was in Ocosingo, on the edge of the Lacandon Selva, the rebels' jungle stronghold, with 6,000 arriving at dawn for a silent procession through the town's center. A mass silent vigil of thousands of Zapatistas in the town's central square continues at press time, despite unseasonable rain. There were no speakers, and no visible leaders present. The EZLN is expected to release a communique for the occasion. The group's last communique was in May 2011, proclaiming solidarity with the poet Javier Sicilia and his movement against Mexico's Drug War militarization. The EZLN's spokesman Subommander Marcos also issued a presonally signed statement on the then-upcoming Mexican elections later last year. (CNN Mexico, W Radio, APRO, Dec. 21)

The death toll after an attempted prison break in north-central Mexico's Durango state on Dec. 18 has risen to at least 23. Nine guards and 14 inmates were killed in clashes at the Social Reinsertion Center (CERESO) Number 2 in the city of Gómez Palacio. The facility's guards fired in the air to stop the jailbreak, and prisoners returned fire at the watchtowers and guard areas. Authorities are now investigating how the prisoners got hold of the weapons. The CERESO has been seized by the military, and the prisoners all relocated while the investigation is underway. CERESO Number 2 also made headlines in 2010 when the facility's warden was himself imprisoned after it emerged that inmates were allowed to borrow weapons from guards and leave the prison at night to carry out murders against gangland rivals. (La Jornada, Dec. 20; LAT, Dec. 19; Global Post, Dec. 18)

The London-based corporation HSBC, Europe's largest bank, will pay the US government $1.92 billion in fines for its failure to prevent money laundering through some of its affiliates, including its Mexican branch, US assistant attorney general Lanny Breuer announced at a press conference in Brooklyn on Dec. 11. However, the US Justice Department has decided not to bring criminal charges against the bank. Breuer noted that bank executives faced some penalties. "HSBC has replaced virtually all of its senior management," he said, "and agreed to partially defer bonus compensation for its most senior officials" over a five-year period.

New Age tourists will be flocking to Mexico's Yucatan Penninsula this week for the "end of the Maya calendar" (sic). But Yucatecan Maya elder José Manrique Esquivel protests that he and his followers will be barred from performing ceremonies at the peninsula's ancient Maya sites. "We would like to do these ceremonies in the archaeological sites, but unfortunately they won't let us enter," Esquivel told the AP. "It makes us angry, but that's the way it is... We perform our rituals in patios, in fields, in vacant lots, wherever we can." Francisco de Anda, press director for the government's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), offers two reasons for the ban: "In part it is for visitor safety, and also for preservation of the sites, especially on dates when there are massive numbers of visitors... Many of the groups that want to hold ceremonies bring braziers and want to burn incense, and that simply isn't allowed."